Cory Doctorow on the weird upside of the Trump presidency

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, blogger and activist, who is the very best form of troublemaker. He’s got a new book out on Enshitification, and I suspect everyone was expecting a talk on the book. Nope. In a frenetic and passionate talk, Cory tells us that Donald Trump is both a dark cloud and a silver lining, due to his destructive nature. Cory references his twenty years of work on tech advocacy around the world. Whenever he talks to policymakers, the response is that if anyone does anything progressive on tech regulation, the US trade representative would kick in their teeth.

The classic example of this is anti-circumvention law: law that prevents anyone from opening a device to see how your printer rejects generic ink or prevents you from copying a CD you own. If HP adds antimodification code to their printer, altering that software becomes a felony. These laws are used to block surveillance on your phone or smart TV. As a result, you’re constantly being ripped off for junk feeds, or prevented from installing software like ICEblock, software that helps you avoid being sent to the gulag.

When the Clinton administration passed these laws, the US trade rep travelled around the world demanding similar legislation in other markets. There’s absolutely no benefit for other countries to sign this sort of legislation – it was simply a promise not to disenshittify US tech.

What was the stick the US used to force people to sign these agreements? Tariffs.

If someone says, “Do what I say or I’ll burn your house down” and they burn your house down anyway, you are a sucker if you do anything they ask.

This opens up a space for everyone to jettison these horrible US first policies.

Trump has made clear that he will use US tech companies to attack countries around the world. Trump and US tech have teamed up to deplatform officials around the world he disagrees with.

One possibility is “the euro stack”, made in Europe alternatives to the US tech stack. But very shortly, the euro stack will hit a wall. You need a way to transition data from the US stack to the euro stack equivalent – no one is going to manually copy and paste all their documents out of the Google or Office cloud.

Don’t expect interoperability to come easily. The DMA has weak provisions designed to open the Apple app store. When the EU threatened to damage the App Store’s fee, Apple has threatened to leave and filed eighteen “frivolous law suits”.

The only way this works is repealing laws, making it possible for European technologists to reverse engineer US tech and migrate to the Euro stack. Otherwise, we are building housing for East Germans in West Berlin. Article 6 of the WIPO copyright directive. That’s what Volkswagon used to protect its cheater diesel code, or what ventilator manufacturers use to lock down their machines to prevent repair.

Canada, Cory tells us, hated the anticircumvention law and fought for years not to implement it. In 2010, Stephen Harper charged two of his ministers with getting this law over the line. They ran a consultation, which was a disaster as thousands of Canadians poured out to oppose the law. So the minister denounced everyone who opposed the law as a “babyish radical extremist”, and Harper got the law over the line.

So isn’t this time to repeal this law, rather than tariffing American farmers? If we got rid of bill C11, we could make everything we buy from America cheaper. Everything we buy from Google and Apple app stores could be 30% lower, we could repair our ventilators and use generic printer ink. By whacking the highest margin lines of business, we would directly retaliate against the CEOs that elected Trump.

You want to get back at Elon? Make it possible to jailbreak a Tesla – that’s how to win a trade war. And we could deploy these products far and wide. Canada could be the country that seizes the opportunity to circumvent protection and open competition around the world. Trump has sown the seeds to overturn some of the world’s worst trade policy and it’s time to reap the harvest.

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